Romantic Imagination Research Articles

Robert Southey and the Romantic Failure of China

In his seminal Oriental poem of 1801, Thalaba Destroyer, Robert Southey teasingly alludes to topos of In Book 6, Southey describes how Thalaba sleeps after journeying at night to dark valley. On waking, he is confronted with a scene of wonders as thousand streams wander across plain into blue ethereal ocean, creating isles of colourful mosses and lichens and spectacular gushing fountains: This was wild and wondrous scene, Strange and beautiful, as where By Oton-tala, like sea of stars, The hundred sources of Hoangho burst. (Southey 2004, 3: 94) Southey here refers to Whang-ho (Huang He) or Yellow River. His notes to these lines direct reader to two sources. The first is A Description of Tibet collected fourth volume of 'Thomas Astley's New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1745-47), from which we learn in place where ho rises, there are more than an hundred springs which sparkle like stars, whence it is called Hotun Nor, Sea of Stars. This remark is attributed to Jesuit, Antoine Gaubil. The second source is Thomas Percy's remarkable 1761 edition of first Chinese novel ever to be translated into English or any other European language for matter, seventeenth-century Ming work, Hao Ch'iu Chuan or The Story of an Ideal Marriage (Hau Kiou Choann or The Pleasing History Percy's version). Percy supplies note describing how Whang ho, or as Portugueze call it Hoam-ho, i.e. River rises not far from source of Ganges Tartarian mountains west of China. He points out river receives its name from yellow mud which stains waters and composes third part of its volume: the Chinese say its waters cannot become clear thousand years; whence it is common proverb among them for any thing which is never likely to happen, proverb actually used novel (Southey 2004, 3: 252; Percy 1761, 2: 214-55). Southey's tentative engagement with literature of China, through Percy's edition of Hau kio Choann, might be regarded as metonymic of Romantic-period response to Qing Empire of late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was clearly fascinated by Chinese and he absorbed much of Percy's translation, yet his interest and knowledge of China was not itself translated into work of Romantic imagination. In letter to John Rickman of October 1808, Southey remembered novel enough to use it discussion of one of his bete noires, practice of polygamy by non-European peoples. Southey argued polygamy was some way responsible for perceived stagnation of 18th century Contra Southey, Rickman argued China goes on pretty well despite its well-known practicing of polygamy and it was want of an alphabet really accounted for what he stereotypically describes as the frozen limits of Chinese science. China's successes, meanwhile, Southey ascribed to its remaining an undivided empire due to unique circumstance of its haying literary aristocracy, all subordinate authority being bands of men whose education and whose habits of life make them averse to war. Robbers are only rebels there; demoralizing effects of system are same there as elsewhere. exemplifies that (Southey 1849-50, 3: 191-92). Shuey-ping-sin (Ping-hsin) is heroine of Pleasing History though novel actually centres on issue of arranged marriage rather than polygamy, which is not heavily featured, though briefly mentioned Percy's notes (1761, 4: 143-44). Southey read great deal more about China than what was discoverable Percy and Astley's collection of voyages. While still at Westminster school, he encountered seven-volume English translation (1733-39) of Jean Frederic Bernard's Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-43), lavishly illustrated by engraver Bernard Picart. …

"The hours and times of your desire": Sholto Smith's romantic vision for Colwyn (1925)

Early in 1920, French-born architect Sholto Smith (1881-1936) decided to abandon his Moose Jaw practice, and his Canadian wife and family, and emigrate to New Zealand. His decision seems to have been precipitated by a memorable encounter with a woman who would later become a celebrated pianist for the Auckland radio station 1YA, Phyllis Mary Hams (1895-1974). Sholto Smith had met Hams during World War I while he was on leave from the Canadian Expeditionary Force and visiting Colwyn Bay, North Wales. Sholto Smith's major contribution to Arts and Crafts Auckland, the house he designed as a gift for Phyllis Hams on the occasion of their marriage on 3 March 1925, was named Colwyn to memorialise their Welsh meeting place. Despite only living in New Zealand for his last 16 years, Sholto Smith left a legacy of over 100 buildings. Colwyn was a well-placed advertisement for his domestic architecture, and his Arts and Crafts and Tudor house designs were soon in great demand throughout the building boom of the 1920s. Smith had arrived in Auckland on 17 March 1920 and immediately joined the practice of Thomas Coulthard Mullions (1878-1957) and C Fleming McDonald. The latter had been the architect of the original Masonic Hotel in Napier (1897), and the firm originally specialised in hotels and commercial architecture using modern materials including reinforced concrete, but dressing the modernist structure with historicist references. Several of their inner-city Auckland buildings such as the Waitemata and Manukau Council building on the corner of Shortland and Princes Street, Chancery Chambers in O'Connell Street and the Lister building on the corner of Victoria and Lorne Streets, still survive. After McDonald's death, Sholto Smith became a partner in the firm and encouraged Thomas Mullions to move into residential property development in central Auckland: Shortland Flats (1922) was a commercial venture where the architects formed a company owning shares in the building which comprised 24 flats designed to generate rental income. But detached suburban domestic architecture was Sholto Smith's real passion. Before leaving Canada for fresh beginnings in New Zealand, he drew an architectural perspective for his ideal home. He titled this drawing Dreamwold, and his vision for this ideal house was to be realised in Auckland at 187 St Heliers Bay Road. For this house design, Sholto Smith drew inspiration from Canadian colleagues such as British Columbian architect Samuel Maclure (1860-1929) and from the British masters of the Arts and Crafts Movement including CFA Voysey (1857-1951) and MH Baillie Scott (1865-1945). Colwyn is reminiscent of the latter's Corrie Wood (1908) in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire in its adventurous open planning. A little bit of Olde Englande recreated in the South Pacific for his homesick new wife, Colwyn was Sholto Smith's perfect Dreamwold, right down to the text on the wooden mantelpiece over the fireplace. The quote inscribed there is taken from the beginning of Shakespeare's sonnet 57, and seems addressed by Smith to his 30-year-old bride: "Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?" Epitomising the romantic archetype, Colwyn remains a fine example of the type of Arts and Crafts dwelling that well-to-do Aucklanders aspired to inhabit in the 1920s.

Mocking the Mothers of the Novel: Mary Wollstonecraft, Maternal Metaphor, and the Reproduction of Sympathy

When Mary Wollstonecraft began her work as a critic for Analytical Review in 1788, literary reviewers were still groping towards criteria of novel-writing (Tompkins 18). Their difficulties, argues J. M. S. Tompkins in The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, stemmed from the vagueness of object for which they were to legislate, and by uncertainty ... as to how fiction could be reviewed (18). Explicitly noting critic's challenge in her first published review, Wollstonecraft observes of The Happy Recovery: a Sentimental Novel by a Lady that analysis of novels will seldom be expected, nor can of be tried by criterion of reason (Works 7: 19). Her demurral suggests another perceived obstacle for reviewers--the overwrought, sentimental language of majority of novels they encountered, and its association with women writers and readers. She summarily dismisses The Happy Recovery as of folly, affectation, and improbability, (7: 19) alluding in review's first line to novel's formlessness. While typical epistolary structure could conceivably undermine formal unity Wollstonecraft desires, heterogeneous mass she identifies has more to with unrestrained expression and fabulation reviewers expected of most women's fiction. Her only other specific comments about The Happy Recovery read as follows: Metaphors and vulgarisms abound. The countess, 'wrapt up in sable and all-encircling mantle of despair, is seized with a violent puking of blood' (7: 19). Like many of her peers, Wollstonecraft relies here, and elsewhere in her reviews, on direct quotation to give her readership a sense of prose style; she then moves quickly to a series of suggestive generalizations about emergent genre and its probable effects on uninformed, unformed female readers. Young women may be termed romantic, she writes, when they boast of being tremblingly alive all o'er, and faint and sigh as novelist informs them they (7: 19). More a quivering sensate than a being, female reader constructed by Wollstonecraft is said to act under direction of artificial (7: 19) transmitted through sentimental novel. The imagination of affected reader hunt[s] after shadows and is suffered to stray ... where no vestige of nature appears because it has been trained to respond only to false sentiment and vague fabricated feelings [that] supply place of (7: 19). It seeks no moderate enjoyments or duties and avoids rational books offering a semblance of reality and order, as they do not throw mind into an exquisite tumult (7: 19). The developing mind is thus a mirror of what it reads: romantic imagination strays and errs like plots of traditional romance; shapeless sentimental novel begets a similarly disordered consciousness. As a former governess, proprietor of a girls' school, and a writer of conduct books, Wollstonecraft clearly has ideas about impact of novel-writing, and if she cannot try The Happy Recovery by any criterion of reason, she is nonetheless anxious to defend its potentially corruptible, would-be readers. She argues: [R]idicule should direct its shafts against this fair game, and, if possible, deter from imbibing wildest notions, most pernicious prejudices; prejudices which influence conduct, and spread insipidity over social converse. (7: 19) Strong action is needed to protect thoughtless readers absorbed by cant of sensibility because they lack independence of mind supported by clear principles and a well-developed reasoning capacity. Unpracticed in self-control or containment, they cannot help but infect others with insipid discourse they have unconsciously imbibed. This impulse toward imitation is manifested variably and uncontrollably: through use of lofty, artificial language in everyday conversation; through narcissistic identification with hyper-sensitive heroines; and through adoption of false sentiments that threaten their sexual purity. …

The Theory and Practice of Restoration in England in the Second Half of the 19<sup>th</sup> Century: The Work of George E. Street

The Romantic vision of ancient architecture, together with the evaluation of the said architecture as historical legacy, have contributed to the extensive path followed by the discipline of architectural restoration towards its consolidation as a scientific method along the 19th and the 20th century. During the Renaissance, when attention was turned to Classic Architecture, the study of the construction methods became the first germ for recognising the value of ancient architecture, in its many styles, as historical heritage. The scientific analysis that then took place in the 19th century, framed in the philosophical trend of Positivism, was also be reflected in architectural restoration: an appropriate intervention had to begin with learning about of the history of the construction. This can easily be understood considering that the term restoration includes many medieval constructions being completed or reconstructed introducing large additions or extensions, which were done taking as reference the use of traditional construction materials with their corresponding traditional technology and the study of agreements and manuscripts. These documents were unveiled by research, in parallel to the development of the formulation of a theoretical structural model, bearing in mind that, initially, masonry, timber and cast iron were the main construction materials, and their properties dictated the nature of structural forms (Charlton 1982). The debate about architectural restoration begun in the 19th century has gone on to history mainly thanks to names like Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin, Morris or Pugin. However, behind these names, a series of prominent figures can be recognized. The group was comprised of individuals of all filiations who were developing and bringing together the theory and the scientific practice originated in the twilights of the 18th century in the newly established French Republic. The innumerable positions, schools, trends and declarations that have developed since then, have today a point in common: the valuation and the respect for ancient architectural monuments, a living testimony for learning about the societies who constructed them. The present work focuses on the figure of the Englishman George Edmund Street (1824-81), whose work is not as well known as that of some of his contemporaries named above, but is not less important for that reason. Street contributed to the restoration of many architectural monuments; his experience allowed him to device certain approaches to this discipline that yielded numerous restoration interventions, both inside and outside England. His work has not received as much attention as that of Butterfield, and his name is certainly not as well known as Scott's. Yet he has hardly been altogether forgotten (Hitchcock 1960).

Broken mirrors/broken minds: the dark dreams of Dario Argento

The colors are aggressively unnatural, perhaps like stained glass-saturated yellow and deep cobalt blue-perhaps artificially limpid, glittering pale turquoise and green. And always red, rich and clear. The camera is nervous. Restless. It swoops and glides, slinking along corridors, crouching at the bottom of staircases, perching on rooftops. It cranes up for dizzying highangle panoramas, hunkers down to admire the tippy-tops of buildings against the blue, blue sky. Unrestrained by strictly narrative concerns, the camera reflects no point-of-view save its own as it creeps across the facade of a sharply angled building for a startling two-and-a-half minutes or hovers over two girls in a baroque swimming pool, their pale legs floating like seaweed beneath the water's rippling surface. The imagery is bizarre, almost surreal; juxtapositions are aggressively inappropriate. A lightbulb glows until its glass skin is shattered by a straight razor; a puff of smoke and then the darkness. A man's drawn face is reflected in a pool of blood; a black gloved hand manipulates a curious collection of fetishized objects-children's toys, knives, bits of braided yarn-in disorienting close-up; a young woman reaches into the shallow puddle where her keys have fallen only to see her arm vanish into water up to the elbow. A woman's shiny red high heel in a boy's screaming mouth, the blue sky above, the white sand below. The world of Dario Argento is one of twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess; it is true Twentieth-Century Gothic with all the inversion, formal imbalance, and riotous grotesquerie the term can encompass. His is a romantic vision, informed by an instinctive appreciation of the contradictory nature of erotic appeal: Argento's camera is alternately enthralled and repelled by ripe flesh and blooddrenched fantasy. A film such as Tenebrae (1982) or Deep Red (1976) peels back the skin and exposes a phantasmagoric maelstrom of secret desires and dreams of death and night and blood. Argento's talents are peculiar and his consistent interest in the horror/thriller genre' has not won him widespread critical acclaim. This is not to say that no genre director is ever taken seriously; Hitchcock is now almost universally revered and his foremost acolyte, Brian de Palma, has always been treated seriously if not necessarily favorably. Consider the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, whose most recent films-Blue Velvet and The Fly (both 1986)-have been accorded mainstream accolates that would have been unthinkable for They Came from Within (Cronenberg, 1976) or even cult favorite Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977). Granted, theirs are still dangerous visions, overdetermined fantasies of treacherous flesh and deadly sex. Lynch's hot flashes from the heart of darkness and Cronenberg's doomed love stories for the plague years will never please all the critics-or all the audiences-all the time. But they are noted, discussed, and examined. Argento's films are largely ignored. Perhaps his assaults on linear logic are too thorough-going; perhaps the hollow, extradiegetic quality of his post-dubbed sound tracks is too disconcerting to the unaccustomed ear; or perhaps there is just too much cerebral drugginess in the air when Inferno (1980) or Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972) is on the screen. The secret puritans in Cronenberg and Lynch-who for all their evident fascination are also clearly appalled by the things that crawl out when they turn over rocks-build penance into the package: images aslime with pus and slobber, dissonant sound tracks, vistas of bruised and deformed flesh undermine the perverse pleasures of the text. Argento murders and maims and splatters blood with abstract abandon, revelling in the mayhem with glorious unselfconsciousness; he is a hedonist who finds his pleasures in unacceptable places and has no compunction about letting everyone in on the fun.

A Romantic Geology: James Hutton's 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’

This article develops a close textual analysis of James Hutton's seminal 1788 'Theory of the Earth' in order to highlight a number of ways that it might be considered as developing a 'Romantic geology' and a Romantic vision of the earth as a self-renewing, endlessly recycling organism.

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination

The law of the letter

I love getting letters. As Tanis discusses in her column, the rise of computing has ensured that they are something of a dying art, particularly the sense of formality and propriety-words like ‘sincerely’ and ‘faithfully’-that accompanies their stylized greetings and valedictions. As a result of letters' absolute rarity, the few I receive sometimes feel like they are sent from another age. It is a romantic vision; to sit, fountain pen in hand, behind a leather-topped desk in a candle-lit study, taking time after dinner to catch up on correspondence with distant cousins, telling stories of an amusing incident during Viscount Melville's visit involving a napkin in a gazebo, orchestrating financial affairs with a representative in the capital, or gossiping wildly over the nuptial affairs of a local wool magnate.

Piedad Yorba

In 1905, Los Angeles's Pacific Electric Railroad picked Piedad Yorba, the great-granddaughter of pioneer Spanish rancher Jose Antonio Yorba, to run an Old California restaurant in a 19th-century adobe at the end of its Glendale trolley line. The restaurant, Casa Verdugo, became wildly popular. It was a must-see spot for Southern California visitors, and a town grew up around it, taking the restaurant's name. When the PE tried to get rid of Piedad Yorba five years later, for once a railroad met its match. With the help of the restaurant's fans, she fought back and won despite the immense political and economic clout California railroads had at the time. In Casa Verdugo, she had created a style of restaurant that was really about a romantic and sensual vision of the good life——colorful setting, exotic food, the scent of flowers, sweet music in a foreign language, all in an atmosphere of unhurried leisure——that would be revived in the 1950s during the Polynesian restaurant craze.

Diferentes visões sobre a cidade

The urban landscape has always applied fascination over the human society. It has been, at the same time, dream and nightmare of a time. In different moments, the urban landscape has been dealt expressing its singularities of its time. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to make a discussion about the different visions of a city that are proposed by academics, movie director and novelists. Since the romantic vision of middle age cities, of Italo Calvino, through the “virtual cities” of Pierre Levy, it has been pointed out the long path of a called “modernity adventure”.

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (review)

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (review)

Strange weather in King Lear

This article argues that King Lear can help re-shape the emerging discourse of eco-criticism. The play's focus on human dis-harmony with the non-human environment resonates with recent developments in ecological science like the “post-equilibrium shift”. Shakespeare's representations of dis-equilibrium in the storm scenes can correct eco-criticism's reliance on pastoral and Romantic visions of harmony. The play's emphasis on the way natural systems, especially the weather, disrupt humanity's meaning-making capacities generates an alternative to dualistic notions of the self–nature relationship. By representing ecological instability and pluralized selfhood, King Lear reminds “green” readers how difficult and disorderly living in a mutable eco-system can be.

Coleridge, Hume, and the Principles of Political Knowledge

Coleridge, Hume, and the Principles of Political Knowledge Timothy Michael (bio) Timothy Michael The University of Chicago Timothy Michael Timothy Michael is Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “British Romanticism and the Principles of Political Knowledge.” Footnotes 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1976) 755. 2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 154. 3. This is not to say that the focus in Romanticism on the dialectic between reason and imagination is not without its own justification. One only needs to think of Wordsworth’s claim in the Mt. Snowdon episode that the imagination is “reason in her most exalted mood” (The Prelude 14); or, of the many instances in Coleridge’s philosophical development, his fascination with Lessing during his 1798 stay in Germany, when it was precisely the “mingling and interpenetration of reason and imagination” that attracted him to Lessing. The understanding may fit uneasily into a conflict of mental faculties—where, in a Blakean context, the struggle between Urizen and Ore contains the most drama—but this incongruity reveals, I think, what is most interesting and distinctive about Coleridge’s political thought. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) 176. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations from The Friend come from the 1818 version (Vol. l of The Friend in the Collected Works), hereafter cited as F in the text, as this was the last edition Coleridge saw through the press. 5. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). 6. See Kant’s discussion of “principlcs” in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 387–88. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR) in Practical Philosophy, trans, and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 153. 8. This “Kantian/Coleridgean” version of Romanticism is hardly the result of a generation of philosophically-minded critics. It extends to some of Coleridge’s earliest critics, such as J. S. Mill: “Now the Germano-Coleridgean doctrine is, in our view of the matter, the result of such a reaction. It expresses the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It is ontological, because that was experimental; conservative, because that was innovative; religious, because so much of that was infidel; concrete and historical, because that was abstract and metaphysical; poetical, because that was matter-of-fact and prosaic. In every respect it flies off in a contrary direction to its predecessor…” Complete Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 10. ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969) 125. 9. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 41. 10. Cairns Craig, “Coleridge, Hume, and the Chains of the Romantic Imagination” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 32. 11. Seamus Perry, “Enlightened Romantics” in Times Literary Supplement (5920, August 20, 2004): 7–8. 12. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CL), ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–) 2: 928. 13. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (BL), Vol. 1, ed. James Engell and W. Jaekson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 291. 14. S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual (SM) in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972) 22. 15. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part 7. Philo, the hard-lined skeptic, relates to Cleanthes, the more cautious skeptic, the Brahmin theory that the “world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels, and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it, by absorbing it again and resolving it into his own essence.” The argument that a possible world exists wholly inhabited by these spiders prompts Philo to assert “Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as from...

La tombe de Louis XXX : agresser la surface, ouvrir le fond

Raising his poetry and poetics against what is associated with the surrealistic canon as the ultimate avatar of the romantic vision, is the challenge accepted by Bataille. In the particular context of the 30-40s, putting poetry back on track meant to tear it from the post-romantic idealism and to distinguish it from the ornamental verbiage resulting from the crisis opened 20 years earlier by the Dadaists (according to Bataille). Composed around 1954, La tombe de Louis XXX is partly a remake of poems written between 1942 and 1945. The collection seems heterogeneous, mingling poetry and theatre, narratives and philosophical thought. Initially, it was also supposed to contain, besides an engraving by Hans Bellmer, one of the photographs of Fou-Tchou-Li in agony and the photograph of a female sex. The book is quite a remarkable example of this double aim, in which the poem becomes the site of staging of the deep self, which uses biographical material in a singular manner.

Discourse Structure and Romantic Imagination in Epic poems of Mo Yun Suk － Focused on Epic poems Hwang Ryong Sa Gu Cheung Tap

Discourse Structure and Romantic Imagination in Epic poems of Mo Yun Suk － Focused on Epic poems Hwang Ryong Sa Gu Cheung Tap

Jupiter's Aeneid: Fama and Imperium

The conflict between Jupiter and Juno in the Aeneid is commonly read as a battle between the forces of order (masculinity, rationality, good) and chaos (femininity, irrationality, evil). The present article argues that this schematization, though morally and aesthetically satisfying, fails to account for most of the data. Virgil's Jupiter is in fact concerned solely with power (imperium) and adulation (fama), despite persistent attempts by readers—and characters in the poem—to see him as benign. By systematically discussing every appearance of Jupiter in the poem, the article seeks to correct the distorted or incomplete views of the god that arise from selective examination. The first section looks at Jupiter's own speeches to illustrate his motivations. The second section demonstrates how these motivations, though frequently misconstrued by the human characters, are confirmed by the glimpses of Jupiter focalized through the omniscient narrator. The third discusses the implications of this portrait of Jupiter for Virgil's vision of Rome and of human happiness.

Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination

Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination

A Venetian Excursion

On his annual visits to Italy, which began during his teens, John Ruskin was influenced by the Romantic vision of Venice. Despite this, he soon looked for critical objectivity and eventually dismissed his Venetian studies as “bye-work” He turned instead to nearby Verona, which had already featured in The Stones of Venice (1851–53). The city's Romanesque and Gothic churches, its funeral monuments and its fortifications combine southern and northern elements, which blend well with the drama of its setting. This essay argues that Ruskin was attracted to the masculine stability of Veronese fortifications in contrast to the feminine and seductive charms of Venice, and that these qualities appealed to the Gothic Revival with its dream of chivalry and idealised imperialism. The interweaving of these matters with the geology and history of the region is the subject of Ruskin's marvelous lecture, “Verona and its Rivers.”

Bengt Jangfeldt, Axel Munthe: the road to San Michele, translated by Harry Watson, London and New York, I B Tauris, 2008, pp. ix, 383, illus., £25.00 (hardback 978-1-84511-720-7).

Dr Axel Munthe (1857–1949) is best known as the author of The story of San Michele (London, John Murray, 1929), a book translated into some forty languages, which has fascinated readers across the world. In a semi-fictional autobiography the elderly Munthe presented himself as an old hermit, retired from medical practice to a mystical retreat on the isle of Capri. The adventures and sentiments of the hero in The story of San Michele were a construction of an alternative life, that of an ideal physician, ever available to his patients, never charging for his services, modelling his life on St Francis, and a benevolent protector of animals. This book and probably also Munthe’s earlier Letters from a mourning city (London, John Murray, 1887, 1899) about volunteer work during a cholera epidemic in Naples inspired many men and women to good deeds in medical service. Munthe did not publish in medical journals. His early fiction, however, provides some interesting glimpses into the practice of medicine a century ago. Bengt Jangfeldt’s biography Axel Munthe: the road to San Michele is a valuable contribution to the publications in English about the medical man Axel Munthe, who developed into a literary personality. Drawing on a treasure trove of Munthe’s preserved private correspondence and other sources, Jangfeldt has meticulously traced his life’s journey and professional career. The younger son of an apothecary in Sweden, Munthe’s brief medical education in Montpellier and Paris prepared him for work as an obstetrician, but he fashioned himself as a nerve doctor, claiming that he had trained under Jean-Martin Charcot at La Salpetriere. His attempts to build a medical practice in Paris in the 1880s failed, but he was assisted to set up practice at Piazza di Spagna in Rome and became a sought-after physician among English, American and Scandinavian expatriates in the 1890s. Munthe retired, a wealthy man, to the isle of Capri, where he would have his main residence for forty years. On Capri he had already built the Villa San Michele, presently a popular tourist attraction. In the private realm, Munthe experienced two failed marriages. With his English second wife Hilda, nee Pennington Mellor, Munthe had two sons. For thirty years he maintained a close relationship with Queen Victoria of Sweden, a relationship lasting until her death in 1930. Munthe left Capri in 1943 and spent the remaining years of his life in an apartment at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Jangfeldt’s main focus is on the Anglophile, cosmopolitan Munthe’s personal life and the social milieux in which he moved. Jangfeldt’s fascination with Munthe’s ascent into high society—diplomatic circles, nobility, and the network of royal families in Europe a hundred years ago—and Munthe’s stance in the two world wars conveys empathy and thrill. Sweden does not have a great biographical tradition on a par with France or Britain. Jangfeldt’s work in this genre is therefore a first. Lytton Strachey pointed out in his preface to Eminent Victorians that a biographer has two duties: to preserve, and to lay bare, to expose. Jangfeldt excels in the first task, but he is not a critical historian who cynically examines his findings to uncover a truth less seductive to a romantic imagination than the first, fresh impressions. Nevertheless, a reader interested to learn about the life of a high society physician a hundred years ago will be well entertained by Jangfeldt’s rendition of Axel Munthe’s story.

"Plurality in Unity": European Identity and European Citizenship

In this paper, an argument is developed in favour of further integration of “Europe” and, most importantly, its increased “politicization”. It is not based on any romantic or idealistic vision of a positive European cultural identity, but on an assessment of Europe's reality as already integrated economically, socially and ecologically, however lagging behind politically in terms of democratic government and citizenship. The seemingly endless discussions about Europe's identity, limit, unity, civilization, etc. are not a problem that is yet to be solved, but are, precisely, the core of what makes Europe what it is: a plurality in unity instead of a “unity in plurality”, as one of the official slogans of the European Union (EU) has it. Current social, economic and environmental problems require European solutions as well as a more active European citizenship. However, European civil identity that is to match European societal reality, will not be a unitary and homogeneous identity, but heterogeneous and diverse, covering a plurality of perceptions, preferences and ideals ‐ it will be plural, not as a first step towards unity, but in its core; and it will be divided, but not along national lines.